Eduardo Andere is one of Mexico’s leading education researchers. Here, he comments on a post by Stephen Krashen about the PISA results.
Well, maybe Mr. Krashen is right! The analysis below may help to buttress many people’s view why American education isn’t so bad after all:
The education of Nobel Prize winners
By Eduardo Andere M .
The 2012 Nobel Prize edition is over. Most Nobel awards throughout history have been assigned to people of a country, whose pre-university education is deemed, by the fans of league tables, mediocre or deficient.
In the international league table OECD’s PISA game, the US is located at around the mean result. For example, in the latest published PISA results, 15 to 16 years old American students ranked somewhere between the 21 and 29 position in mathematics out of 34 OECD countries. Mexico and Chile are tied at the bottom. Finland and South Korea, meanwhile, top the list. So, the U.S. is closer to the bottom than it is to the top.
Most disappointing is the fact—the critique goes—that US pre-university education is among the most expensive in the world. While Americans spent in 2007 (latest published data) $ 129,000 per elementary, middle and high school student, the Finns spent 87 000, and the South Koreans 80 000 (OECD 2010). This makes each PISA point cost the U.S., $87, while Finland and South Korea pay 53 and 49 respectively.
Let’s see what happens at the other end of the educational and knowledge pyramid. The Nobel Prize is one epitome of the educational, scientific and technological apparatus. The award is given in five categories: physics, chemistry, medicine, literature, economics and peace. In many cases an award is given to several winners, so there are more winners than prizes. In 2012, for example, there are 10 winners and five awards: two in physics, two in chemistry, two in medicine, two in economics, one in literature and one, peace award, to the European Union.
Of the nine human-recipient awards, five are American by birth, one is Moroccan, one Japanese, one British, and one more, Chinese (literature). And of the eight who have university affiliation (because the literature prize has not so) six are affiliated to U.S. universities.
Historically, from 1901 through 2012, 555 awards have been granted to 863 people, of which 246 are US nationals. From a total of 620 university-related laureates 321 are affiliated to US universities. And if one looks at the top ten universities with Nobel laureates nine of them are American.
China, whose Shanghai province and the Special Administrative Region of Hong Kong, obtained outstanding results in PISA 2009, has a total of 10 Nobel winners in history. Finland, South Korea and Singapore, the top countries in basic and high school education, have earned three, one and zero Nobel Prizes.
If one delves deeper into science, technology and innovation, the United States shines with most of the production in all three areas. And within the realm of business success in the knowledge era, all, or almost all star companies in the 21st century, which permeate the lives of all of us, such as Google, Apple, Amazon, Intel, Facebook, Dell, Yahoo, Microsoft, Wikipedia, YouTube, PayPal, and Twitter, among others, are of U.S. origin.
So, what is going on? If the Nobel contest is the point of a knowledge iceberg, the so-called quality education assessment of students, schools and teachers is missing something. How come the shooting stars of basic education pale in higher leagues?
http://eduardoandere.net/english/publications-in-english/articles/the_nobel_prize_winners.pdf
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Perhaps it’s missing the massive research infrastructure available to people in the States: scientists, engineers, doctors, etc., get support from corporations or universities, and so can make the discoveries that earn them prizes.
Excellent point. For example, consider Bill Gates, who did not come out of a bubble — he benefitted tremendously from public research.
Of course, with a population of 315 million, (compare that to Finland, with a population of 5 million) and a fair number of elites with access to top-notch cradle-to-grad school education — I’m not so surprised. This is part of the huge wealth gap in the US. The real scandal, as far as I’m concerned, is how difficult it is to move up and down the social ladder in the US, the country with the least social mobility in the industrialized world. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/howard-steven-friedman/class-mobility_b_1676931.html
I would be more impressed if more kids from poor areas were winning Nobels, Elite schools, such as Sidwell Friends, which the Obama girls attend, promote independent thinking, the arts, and creativity. Public schools in poverty-stricken are getting more and dominated by bubble sheets and teachers who work under poor conditions. Will that promote the kind of thinking that leads to real innovation and creativity? I have my doubts.
The only legitimate way to evaluate the educational system of a nation is to gauge the productivity of its adults. In that category, the United States is tops. That said, there is no denying that there is a huge gap between our rich and poor.
Why do Americans do so much better than other advanced countries in respect to ingenuity and productivity? My guess is this: Until recently the American way was for a child to be educated gently (i.e. without much pressure) until college. At that point many “blossom,” study very hard, and achieve great things. In contrast, many students in other countries study engage in serious test-prep study from early childhood (as opposed to self-selective activities) and then “coast” when they get to college. Research from learning psychology tells us that rigorous study for the child under 14 is inappropriate and counterproductive. Students who study too much in the early grades often burn out by the age of 18. Biographies of famous people tell us that many great achievers spent their childhoods playing in a way that prepared them for their eventual careers: Frank Lloyd Wright played with blocks, Thomas Edison “tinkered” (didn’t even go to school), Picasso drew. My own son spent much of his childhood playing with Legos and computers and now he has a Ph.D. in engineering from Stanford.
Now the United States is headed in the direction of testing meritocracies. Will our level of ingenuity and productivity fall? Only time will tell but I believe we’re on a dangerous path and one that we’ll regret.
It is the freedom of choice of a capitalist system.
Well, remember that many entrepreneurs benefit from publicly funded research. Twitter, Facebook, Google, would be nowhere, had not the U.S. military developed the foundations for the internet. This often goes unnoticed.
The foundations, yes, but then it kept its monster stultifying hands off it. Now Obama wants to let the United Nations regulate it.
Our children may not do well on standardized tests at early ages, but they are given a wonderful foundation on which to build. They are curious students who are divergent in their ability to solve problems and in their ability to express themselves in writing or in the arts. These skills are neither valued nor assessed on standardized tests.
It doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense to compare current global school rankings to historical Nobel Prize statistics, because the Nobel Prizes are awarded several decades after the prize-winners went to school. The future will show if today’s top-ranked school systems will generate more Nobel Prize winners.
But critics were saying equally terrible things about US schools in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. How did those terrible schools produce so many Nobelists?
In that case, I concede the point. I lack the historical perspective on US schools 🙂
The award is given in five categories: physics, chemistry, medicine, literature, economics and peace. Let’s see, 1. physic, 2. chemistry, 3. medicine, 5. literature, 5. economics, and 6. peace. Huh?